|  Design objectives 
  CORRECT                     this means not just "no bugs" -- it means all
                        the interaction of all parts works as specified
                        by the standard.
 TRADITIONAL                    and beyond the standard, it shall behave in
                        tradional ways to allow to easily adapt sources 
                        from older forth systems to the PFE.
 COMPLETE                     with powerful computers on the desk and powerful
                        programming environments there is no need
                        to and no use in strategies like "here kernel,
                        there xyz word set" that might be appropriate
                        on a microcontroller.
 PORTABLE                     I hate to rewrite code because of environmental
                        dependencies. The PFE uses autoconf/automake for 
                        automatic system detection, and its drivers for
                        system interaction are largely seperated out.
  USABLE                     A sole kernel helps noone. It should be a
                        development environment. You should be able
                        to manage multiple-source-file-projects from
                        within. A source debugger and help files are
                        included of course.
  SIMPLE                     or transparent. At least to my taste. The
                        coding style should make it easy to pick up
                        PFE and adapt it to whatever environment it
                        shall run in.
 |   MODULAR                     it allows to add extensions during runtime.
                        There is no need to rebuild the PFE core for
                        each different application, the main runtime
                        can be shared and extended with extra modules.
 FREE                     apart from being free of cost, the PFE is given
                        away under LGPL (not the GPL!) which allows you
                        to add dynamic extra modules under whatever
                        copyright you wish to, even commercial ones. 
                        No GPL virus here.
 OPEN                     and if you have a nice extra module then I am
                        open to ship it along and to provide it with
                        whatever hooks are needed in the LGPL core.
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